Here is the video of my lecture from last October’s Recovered Voices symposium at the Colburn School in Los Angeles. The topic was: The Fifth Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich: Re-Visiting Absolute Music, Historical Memory, and the Concretization of Experience.

Ignat Solzhenitsyn Lecture: The Fifth Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich: Re-Visiting Absolute Music, Historical Memory, and the Concretization of Experience Few composers have engendered so much debate in the West as Dmitri Shostakovich, regarding both the intrinsic value of his music and whether it can ever be divorced from its cultural-historical significance.